Validium In The HRDirector

Validium In The HRDirector

Focusing on employee engagement and wellbeing, Unipart set about making employees feel even more cared for, and training managers to really listen to people was key. To operate well, a logistics relies on total commitment, so as well as engaged and happy people, the business benefits were immediately obvious.

When one of our logistics centres found itself taking 80 hours a week to create and run reports, it was engaged employees who took the time to work with their colleagues in IT to redesign the reports and automate part of the process to halve the time taken and save £20,000. There’s a wealth of untapped potential in every employee, but you can only tap into that if they’re at work and well. Ultimately, we believe that healthy, engaged employees will do their best for us, and the customer, which is why we’ve always placed wellbeing at the heart of our employee engagement initiatives. Unfortunately, managers – the people with the most power to influence how cared for an employee feels – often have very little understanding of how what they say and how they listen can impact on employees, with most managers constantly missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with employees on a daily basis due to 10 Fundamental Blocks to Listening, which are outlined at the end of this article. This ranges from filtering out what the employee is saying, to interrupting them to give unsolicited advice or changing the topic if the employee starts to talk about something personal, such as a relationship breakdown or financial worry.